His lips twitched with amusement at her blunt question, but his eyes weren’t smiling.
There was a time when that little hint of a grin would have melted her heart. Now her heart was frozen solid where he was concerned.
“Here in Louisiana or here in your shop?” he asked.
“Both.”
“I’m here to visit my MawMaw.”
“For how long?”
He shrugged.
Emelie recalled what Bernie had told her, and now she felt guilty for her rudeness. “Sorry. I heard that Miss MaeMae’s been ill. Hope it’s nothing serious.”
He didn’t answer, and she could tell by the way his jaw went rigid that it was very serious. Just then, she noticed Mike and Max watching the interplay between her and Justin, and without thinking, she said to Justin, “Would you like to come back and have a cup of coffee?”
He hesitated, which should have felt like an insult, but she understood what he clearly did, too: shaky ground. “Sure.”
She led him through Belle’s workroom and into her studio. He studied the area, both hers and Belle’s, with interest.
“How long have you and Belle been in business?”
“Five years,” she said, going over to the counter on the side and starting a new pot of coffee. Her hands were shaking. Darn it!
“Didn’t your Grandmother Delphine used to live here?”
“I’m surprised you remember that.”
“Me, too.”
What did that mean? “Yeah, this house belonged to MawMaw Delphine. She left it to me when she died seven years ago. I’d been living with her for a few years before that, working for an artist over on Chartres Street.”
She turned, leaning back against the counter. She could see her answer raised other questions. But instead of asking any more, he walked around the studio, examining her masks, both those already completed, resting in special, pre-formed velvet boxes, and the works in progress. “You’re very talented, Em. But then, I always knew that.” He picked up the box that had been a gift from him for her sixteenth birthday. The colored pencils were long gone, but she used it now for her assorted paintbrushes.
Their eyes connected for a long moment as they both recalled that long-ago moment when he’d given her the gift. In those days, she’d been the only one to see any good in him, aside from his grandparents. But then, he’d been of an opinion, If you’ve got the name, you might as well play the game. In other words, he acted down to his bad reputation.
“You kept it,” he said, fingering the carvings on the box, which wore a patina of aged cypress.
She shrugged. “It’s a nice box,” she replied, as if that were the only reason she’d kept it. It was, she insisted to herself.
Like it was only yesterday, she recalled the pure joy on his young face when he’d handed her the clumsily wrapped gift. A lump formed in her throat now, as it had then, and she feared she might cry. Why, she wasn’t sure. “Have a seat outside by the fountain? I’ll bring our coffee out.”
His head was tilted in question, as if he wanted to ask her something, but then he nodded, without speaking, and went out the French doors.
With knees almost buckling, Emelie picked up her cell phone and called Belle. “Where are you?” she demanded.
“I’m on my way. Is there is an emergency?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Em? Are you crying?” Belle asked with concern.
“No. Of course not,” she replied, swiping at her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“My past is sitting out in my courtyard, and I’m afraid… I’m afraid, that’s all. Come quick, and rescue me.”
Chapter Six
Some things were just meant to be…
Cage’s emotions were banging off the walls of his aching chest like Ping-Pong balls.
What the hell am I doing here? Go home, you idiot. Go back to the bayou and forget you ever saw her again.
Hah! Like I can ever forget Em as she is now.
A woman.
Not the girl I loved.
But better.
Different.
And the same.
Cage inhaled deeply and exhaled to calm himself down. He was sitting on the far side of a wrought iron patio table, a position that gave him a view of all his surroundings, a SEAL reflex built in after years of training. Secure your perimeter. Never give your enemy a chance to surprise you.
But Em wasn’t his enemy. Just a danger. To his well-being. To his heart.
He could see through the glass door that Em was puttering away, putting cups of coffee and other dishes on a tray. He’d already been through the downstairs retail space and workshops, and wondered what was upstairs. All he could see was a covered gallery, or balcony. Probably an apartment. But who lived there? The boys had mentioned living outside the city; so it must be Em’s home. Did someone live here with her? Well, duh! Her husband, of course. Bernie the Wienie—that’s what he’d been called when they were kids.
Just then, he noticed a paper lying on the ground under the table. Reaching down, he picked it up and scanned the words on it with increasing incredulity. Under the letterhead, Southern Reproductive Services, a Dr. Charles Benoit was thanking Emelie Gaudet for her interest in artificial insemination.
Cage dropped the paper as if it had burst into flames in his fingers, and it fluttered to almost the same spot where it had lain previously. He tried his best to look nonchalant, knowing without a doubt that Em would consider his reading the letter an invasion of privacy, even if it had been unintentional.
But Holy Hell! Em was considering having a baby with some anonymous guy’s swimmers? What about Bernie? Maybe he had problems with the old… wiener.
Cage smiled with warped satisfaction. He even hoped Bernie couldn’t get it up. That would be justice, wouldn’t it?
But then, maybe the problem was with Em. Aaahh, that was too bad. Well, then, he could see why she would seek this alternative.
But wait. That letter had been addressed to Em as Emelie Gaudet, not Landry. What did that mean? Maybe nothing. Lots of women kept their maiden name today or hyphenated the hell out of their surname. One of his team members had a wife who went by the name of Mary Lou O’Brien-Spilhowsky. Shiiit! Try saying that real fast.
So many questions.
He heard the French doors opening. Em held the door open with her butt and eased her way through with the laden tray, letting the door slam behind her. Two mugs of coffee and a plate of what appeared to be doughnuts. He stood to help her.
An idea came to him then, out of the blue. Was it inspiration or madness? Probably both.
Cage’s MawMaw yearned to hold his baby before she died.
Em wanted a baby.
For some reason, Bernie was not to be the father.
Did he want a kid?
Didn’t matter. What mattered was his grandmother.
But he couldn’t just pop the question to Em. Like, “Hey, chère, wanna shake some sheets and make a rugrat?” Nope, he needed a plan. He was an expert at planning. Well, battle planning, but same thing. Right?
As Em set the tray on the table, he watched her every move. Only when she sat down across from him and he’d taken a sip of his coffee—made just the way he liked it, by the way, with one spoon of sugar and a dash of milk—he smiled and said, “You look really good, Em.”
She arched a brow skeptically, as if she knew he’d been thinking something else. “You, too.” She stared at him directly and said with the honesty he’d once loved about her, “You’ve come a long way, Justin. The Navy appears to have been good for you.”
So, that was the way it was going to go. Polite conversation. Okay, he could do that. For now. “It was hard at first. The military has a way of breaking a man down, then building him back up into the mold they want. A difficult process when a grunt was there by choice. Much harder when it was a forced decision. Signing up, I mean.” Damn! He hadn’t meant to mention his involuntary exit out of good o
l’ Loo-zee-anna and, by implication, her part in the virtual kick in the ass.
She didn’t appear offended, though. Maybe his zinger had passed over her. Maybe that was how little she’d care about what happened to him. Maybe he was pathetic.
“You were so wild as a teenager,” she was saying. “I can’t imagine how they managed to tame you.”
“With a lot of pain,” he told her. “Then later, when the SEALs approached me, I found a niche I loved.”
“A niche?” she commented with a laugh. “That’s not even a word you would have known at one time.”
“Hey, bite your tongue. I have a college degree now.”
“You?” she exclaimed, then quickly added, “Sorry. That was insulting.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “No offense taken. The Loser of Bayou Black an academic success? Talk about! Hell, I surprised myself. But I needed a degree in order to gain officer status.”
She arched her brows in question.
“Lieutenant, second grade.”
He waited for her to comment on him being an officer, but instead she said, “Justin, I never thought of you as a loser.”
“Hmpfh! You were the only one.”
She stared into her coffee cup for a long moment before raising her eyes. “I didn’t know what my father did. Not back then.”
That was a surprise, but then not so much of a surprise when you considered what a domineering, single-minded bastard her father had been. “He threatened to have me charged with statutory rape, you know. I would have been classified as a pedophile. Hard time. Of course, as sheriff of Terrebonne Parish, he had Judge Benoit in his pocket. It wasn’t an empty threat.”
“I know. I found out a year after you were gone.”
“Was that before or after you married my cousin?” The question slipped out before Cage had a chance to bite his tongue.
She blinked with surprise at his surly tone of voice. “After. At the time of our divorce actually.”
Divorce? Whoa! That raised a boatload of questions. And answers, like, that’s why Bernie wasn’t going to be planting any seeds. “You weren’t married for very long then.”
“Six months,” she said.
“So is your father still running your life?” That was blunt and insulting, but it was the truth. Her father had ruled her life like a dictator, allowing her little freedom.
“He still tries, but he hasn’t had much luck. In fact, I didn’t speak to him for years. We only made up about two years ago, and even now we’re on tenuous ground.”
That shocked him. Despite his overprotection, Em and her father had been very close. “Because of me?” he asked.
“Only partly.” Then, steering the conversation away from what was obviously a painful subject for her, she remarked, “You mentioned your grandmother is ill.”
He nodded. “Lung cancer. I just came from visiting her oncologist this morning.”
She reached across the table and placed a hand over his. “Oh, Justin, I’m so sorry. But you know, there have been great strides in cancer research. With treatment, she could have years to live yet.”
He was shocked at how good that mere touch of her hand felt and so it was moments before he slipped his hand away and shook his head, “Too late for MawMaw. The doctor says six months to a year.”
She put a palm over her mouth and her eyes brimmed with tears. She had always been sensitive like that. “I should go visit her sometime. I mean, she was always nice to me, except at the last, but then she was only obeying your orders.”
The last? What last? He stiffened. “What orders?”
“Not to give me your address or telephone number. I have to admit that I made a nuisance of myself. Begging for information to the point that your grandfather told me that I had to stop asking.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
But they had no chance for further discussion because Em’s partner, Belle Pitot, arrived.
He stood and smiled, having known her since they were kids at Our Lady of the Bayou School. She’d been Em’s best friend.
“Well, well, well! Look what the cat dragged in,” Belle said, coming up and giving him a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. A greeting that had been noticeably missing from Em, he realized.
Em used Belle’s arrival to leave. “I’ve got to get back to work. It was great seeing you again, Justin.”
Yeah. Right.
Cage and Belle talked for a while, and he happened to mention all the animals that his grandmother had rescued and his dilemma in finding them homes.
“Hey, maybe my boys can come over this weekend and help clean up the yard. They always need spending money, and it would get them out of my hair just before Mardi Gras.”
“That would be great,” he said.
“By then, I might have ideas for placement of some of the animals,” she added. “Do you think I could visit a spell with Miss MaeMae when I drop the boys off? I haven’t spoken with her for ages.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring a box of chocolate-covered cherries. Those used to be her favorites.”
Cage had forgotten how easily Southern folks reached out to help others and how thoughtful they could be. Plus, MawMaw would enjoy the company. Bless Belle for remembering the chocolate-covered cherries.
A short time later, he was driving back to his grandmother’s home on Bayou Black, his mind spinning with everything that had happened this morning, starting with the visit to Dr. Pozniak, ending with Emelie. He felt so hopeless—where his grandmother was concerned, of course, but about Em, too. After all these years, he shouldn’t care. He didn’t care. Still…
He stopped at Boudreaux’s General Store for the milk his grandmother had asked him to buy on the way home, and decided to pick up some beer. He stood in front of the glass doors of the refrigerated shelves, contemplating whether he should try Abita Turbodog or Tin Roof Voodoo Bengal Pale Ale—Only in Loo-zee-anna, he thought with a rueful shake of the head—and decided to take a six-pack of each.
When he was about to pay for his purchases, who did he run into but Tante Lulu. He hadn’t seen her since she’d flown back to Louisiana with him last week. She was wearing her usual outrageous gear… a red Annie-style wig, black skinny jeans that molded her nonexistent butt, topped with an orange stretch T-shirt that molded her flat chest with OLD CHICKS ROCK! printed on it in sparkly letters. On her feet were white orthopedic shoes.
The old lady’s face lit up on seeing him enter. “I was jist thinkin’ ’bout you,” she squealed.
Uh-oh!
“Here. I got somethin’ fer you.” She dug into her purse, which was about the size of Vermont, and pulled out a little plastic statue. Handing it to him, she said, “Thass St. Jude. He’s the patron saint of hopeless cases.”
Cage tilted his head to the side, at the same time marveling at how warm the statue felt in his hand, almost like it throbbed with heat. “How did you know I was feeling hopeless?”
“Sweetie, we all feel hopeless one time ’r another.”
The heart remembers…
Emilie was a basket case, having trouble concentrating on her work. She couldn’t stop thinking about Justin.
Finally, she gave in to an impulse she’d suppressed for seventeen years. She brought out a step stool and accessed the crawl space above her bedroom, pulling out a shoe box.
Going into her bathroom, she dampened a washcloth and wiped off the thick layer of dust, then carried the box out to her second-floor balcony that overlooked the courtyard and set it on a table. Tears burned her eyes before she even lifted the lid.
On top was an old BITE ME BAYOU BAIT COMPANY T-shirt of Justin’s. She’d worn it home when the air turned chilly the first night they’d made love on a picnic table at Cypress Park. They would have been more comfortable on the grass, but there was always a fear of snakes. Neither of them had minded the discomfort, though. They’d waited so long and were so hot for each other. She held the shirt up
to her face, imagining that she could catch his scent, which was ridiculous, of course.
She smiled at what she saw next. A program for the Christmas Pageant at Our Lady of the Bayou School. She’d been an angel, and Justin had been one of the shepherds placed in the back of the stage, way back, where he couldn’t cause any mischief. He’d had a cowlick in those days, and he’d claimed that was why he wasn’t chosen to be an angel; the halo wouldn’t fit. It never would as he got older, but not because of a cowlick.
There was a junior varsity football letter he’d given her in ninth grade. That was the last year he’d played any sport, probably because about then his father was killed in prison, where he’d been serving yet another sentence, armed robbery that time, she thought. After that, Justin went wild. Went to school only when he felt like it. Got into fights. Had a chip on his shoulder the size of a bayou barge. Her heart ached at how hurt and rebellious he’d been then. It got even worse the next year when his mother committed suicide—or died of an overdose. It was never clear since she’d been living in Miami at the time.
Justin had only been a boy, really, but he’d had to face some serious adult issues. He hadn’t been much older than Mike and Max. She could only imagine how they would be under similar conditions.
She had to laugh at what she saw next. A little zip-lock baggie of dried shrimp with a cardboard attachment advertising the Grand Isle Shrimp Emporium. She wasn’t about to check and see if the shrimp could still be used after almost twenty years. She’d heard the company had lost everything during Hurricane Katrina.
It had been a day out of time, one of those periods in your life that even when it’s happening you know it is a magic moment. Her entire eighth grade class had been looking forward to the field trip, not so much for the lesson they would be getting in a historic cultural industry, but to be out of doors on a warm spring day.
The highlight of the day had been “dancing the shrimp,” in which the main participant had been none other than the scampy Justin LeBlanc.